23 Simple Things You Can Do To Create A Perfect Morning Routine

As you open them, you find yourself in a room with only a desk and a chair.

You approach towards, you see a book, which has your name on it and “My Unfulfilled Dreams” written next to it.

For the first couple of seconds, you are struck in awe.

And questions start appearing:

What is this? How can this exist?! Do I read it, or not?

You are baffled.

As you open the second page, you see a list of your dreams. The ones that never happened.

And right below each dream, there’s an excuse that you used not to go for it.

Dream: Follow my passion!

Excuse: “But there’s no money in it.”

Dream: Travel the world!

Excuse: “But I don’t have the time.”

…

And as you go through this book, you start to remember what each one of those dreams meant to you.

Tears start sliding down your face as you reach the end.

Suddenly you stumble upon on one page that has your current age on it and following written:

Yes, you’ve used excuses. But right now that doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you are alive now and you still have time left to go after them.

The only thing that is left is to decide whether or not you will use an excuse now?

…

I’ll let you think about that for a moment.

If you are similar to me, you want to create a life that will help you achieve those dreams.

To do that, you need to learn how to master your time, use it in the most efficient way that will help you get results.

The first step is to discover how to use those first hours of your morning because they set the tone for the entire day.

That’s why it’s important to crush the beginning of the day because it will reflect on rest of it.

The morning routine is nothing more than several habits.

There are two types of habits you would want to form:

1. Habits that can improve quality of your life in the present

2. Habits that can improve the quality of your life in the future

Ideally, you should focus to form habits that give you both.

Such as an exercising.

By doing so, you will start seeing a mighty change; that will influence and drastically improve every area of your life:

You will reach optimal health

Your energy will be high and vibrant

You will unleash your creative life

Your financial situation will improve

You will have a chance to grow and learn more

Your relationships will become better

Your emotional life will find its equilibrium

You will be made more productive than ever

and many more things will happen.

Before we proceed with the actual things, have you ever heard of The Marshmallow Experiment?

The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University.

In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately or two small rewards (i.e., a larger later reward) if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. (The reward was sometimes a marshmallow, but often a cookie or a pretzel.)

In follow-up studies (10 years later), the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures.

Trying to make significant changes in your life will be difficult.

But if you manage to delay gratification, and establish the desired habit, your life will grow exponentially.

The way you can achieve that is to focus on the present moment and try to enjoy every single thing you do.

There are five essential things you would want to achieve in the morning:

Become Alert

Take care of your emotional state

Take care of your intellectual growth

Take care of your health

Work on your long-term goals

There are numerous things you can do to achieve these five things.

I’ve managed to compile universal activities, based on the research and personal experimentation.

So let’s start.

23 Simple Things You Can Do To Create A Perfect Morning Routine

1. Wake Up Earlier

I firmly believe that everyone should develop a habit of getting up earlier. Even if you don’t think, you are a morning person.

But in the modern world, they have us believe that we are a failure if we don’t wake you at 4:30 AM or 5 AM in the morning.

Which is far from the truth.

I think it would be foolish to assume that everyone should wake up at 5 AM. I believe that it’s an excellent idea, but whether or not you should get up that early depends on your lifestyle (a student who studies until early morning and a person which has to be at work at 7 AM, cannot form the same habit).

What you need to do is optimize your sleeping/waking up, so you can be fully rested and healthy, and that it supports your goals.

Don’t make drastic changes.

If you want to get up at 6 AM, but you’re at 8 AM.

Start with 7:45 AM. And do that for two days.

Then go down to 7:30. And so on.

This will help you create a slow transition, and once you reach 6 AM, just try to keep up the momentum, until it becomes a habit.

2. Drink 16oz (500ml) water

Your body just went 5–8 hours without hydration. So you need to make up the difference.

Water kickstarts your metabolism, hydrates you, helps your body flush out toxins, gives your brain fuel, and may even make you eat less.

3. Make your bed

Doing this in the morning is going to be the first thing you will accomplish. So it will give you a small sense of pride, and a boost in motivation to focus on other things.

As Tim Ferriss says: “no matter how sh**ty your day is, no matter how catastrophic it might become, you can make your bed.”

Simple, yet powerful.

4. Stretch

Stretching can help improve flexibility, which can enhance your performance in physical activities or decrease your risk of injuries while enabling your muscles to work efficiently.

This takes 2 minutes, but it will have a big effect on you.

5. Engage In A Physical Activity

Depending on your lifestyle, goals and personal preference, this can be anything:

6. Take a Warm Shower (followed with COLD burst and fast breathing)

This will not only give you energy and feeling of freshness, but it will drastically improve your physical and mental well-being, it improves your immune and digestive system, plus it can help with weight loss.

Plus, right after the exercise, there’s nothing better than a nice shower.

7. Drink either Coffee or Tea

This is an entirely personal preference, but both of these have benefits for the body and promote alertness, which is more than welcome in the morning.

And there is also the idea of having your peace in the morning while drinking something warm.

8. Create A Healthy Diet

Think of your body as a vehicle. If you want it to go great distances, you have to take care of it.

The biggest problem is that people think only short-term.

When it comes to dieting, it shouldn’t be something you do once in a while.

But it should be part of who you are.

So educate yourself on the topic, and create your perfect diet.

The math is simple.

If you cut unhealthy food, and replace it with healthy food = Healthy Body

9. Reflect On The Day Before

We had a saying back at home that “Morning is always smarter than the night.”

The reason is that you go through a lot within one day. Decision making, interactions, physical activity.

This depletes your capability to see things from a fresh perspective.

So reflect on the day before, see what you did right (and how can you continue doing that), and what you did that can be improved?

Draw the lessons, and apply them right away.

10. Be Grateful

Once you’ve closed the chapter of yesterday, focus on the present.

What are the things that you have in life that you feel truly grateful for? People? Experiences? Love? Health? Progress? Growth?

And just remind yourself about it, because it will give you a sense of humility, and a good starting point to do more.

11. Journal

“Dear diary,

Today…”

It doesn’t have to be a cliche.

But the act of letting your mind wander and channeling it to a notebook is incredible.

The amount of ideas and realizations that will happen will astonish you.

Whatever comes to mind, just let it be.

This can indeed be a therapeutic experience.

12. Establish A Grounding Activity

We live in a world that doesn’t stop, and it’s rare to find a peaceful moment.

That’s why you need to find a way to be more in the present and calm your thoughts.

What you want to do here, is to create a grounding effect.

Meditation and prayer are just one of the ways you can achieve that, but not the only ones.

You can create a mix of different things, depending on what suits your needs.

13. Set and Review Goals

This is important because if you know what you are striving to achieve, you will be able to direct your attention to it.

Goals work like a lens of a camera.

If you set the lens and focus correctly, you will be able to take a clear picture.

If it is out of focus, your picture will be blurry.

Focus on one year ahead, and set from 3–5 primary goals, for the most important areas of your life (work, health, social relationships, personal growth, travel, etc.)

Make your goals specific, and phrase them in a way as if you’ve already achieved them.

And once you have set your goals, come back to them every day and do a review, to see can something be improved or adapted.

14. Visualize Your Goals

Once you have your goals in place, a direction in life, you need to visualize your path towards accomplishing them.

By adding details, a clear path, and emotion of how would it feel if you already achieved it, you trick your mind into believing that it is already capable of achieving it.

Warning.

I want to be quite clear; this is not the Law of Attraction type of a thing. Where you imagine a Ferrari, and tomorrow it magically appears next to your mansion.

It doesn’t work like that.

Visualization is one side of the coin. Hard work and dedication is another side of the coin.

15. Develop A Strategy

Goals set. Path envisioned.

Now you need to create a simple strategy that will help you get there.

What are the things you need to do to make your goals happen? What are the milestones?

When is the deadline?

What are the possible roadblocks?

When you have this in place, you need to break it down further.

16. Set Priorities For The Day

Your priorities should be derived from your strategy.

High leverage activities that you should focus on that day that will bring you closer to your goals.

Ideally, you would want to set 3–5 activities and determine the hierarchy of importance for each one of them.

17. Read Books

No matter what genre you are reading, the real immersion in the topic will spark your creativity and unleash your imagination.

Each book has at least one good idea it can offer you; that can help you grow personally or professionally.

So whenever you open a book, look for just one idea, and you will see how soon they will start lining up.

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Phol Jansinger

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